


Wants and Wishes

by smolhombre



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, BAMF Hermione Granger, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Feelings, Gen, Mirror of Erised
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-14 23:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8032771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: Three days after Ron leaves, Harry mentions the Mirror of Erised; the first non-monosyllabic words they’ve exchanged in nearly forty-eight hours. That is to say:Hermione has always wanted too much. But still with the knowledge she would get it all, eventually.





	Wants and Wishes

Three days after Ron leaves, Harry mentions the Mirror of Erised; the first non-monosyllabic words they’ve exchanged in nearly forty-eight hours. They’ve nestled themselves in a small nook on the chalky cliff side overlooking Compton Bay, close enough to the comforting lull of the tide as they dared while able to claim some amount of cover from the ragged white outcrop looming over the sandy coastline below, looking like rich, golden velvet as the sun sets above. Soft oranges and rich pink stripe across Harry’s profile, the bump in the bridge of his nose, settling lilac into the hollowed bags under his eyes. She looks resolutely away from him as he continues to speak, to the plastic wrappers in her lap.

“I think if I looked in it now I’d see something else.”

“You were eleven, Harry,” She sighs, trying to not sound as irritated as she feels. “Of course you’d see something different now.”

“No, I mean - ” Harry fiddles with the corner of his own candy bar wrapper, all pilfered from the petrol station several kilometers north of the coast. “I can’t imagine wanting anything as big, anymore.”

“Big?”

“Maybe not big. I want - things I actually want now. Then I wanted it because I knew I couldn’t have it, really.”

Hermione places the Daim bar beside her, picks up the bottle of water to avoid answering. Harry watches her openly till she’s forced to hum noncommittally around the mouth of the bottle.

“I want him here.” He pauses, frowning around the words. “I would see that now. It’s - okay if you do to.”

“Don’t ever say that to me again.”

Hermione grips the bottle so tight it crumples in her hand, water spilling over her hand like a little steaming geyser - no, that’s the magic, the last bit. Harry watches her warily as she breathes through her nose. “Don’t presume what I want.” Twisting the lid back on the bottle as primly as she’s able, she sets it next to her chocolate bar. “I don’t know what you’re on about. I don’t want things I can’t have.”

Harry opens his mouth to reply, she’s sure - but she’s the real expert on having the last word, here, and is halfway out of their little nook and headed to the emptying beach as soon as she tosses out her final words. All the better; it seems a more melodramatic declaration with every step.

Even if it's true, it doesn’t matter.

She waits in the growing shadow at the base of the cliff until the last of the muggles have long cleared the shore, disillusionment charm or no. It’s chilly - already she feels the absence of the sun through her pullover, buries her hands in the hoodie pocket and grips the comforting anchor of her wand there - but getting her trainers bogged down by sand sounds seven shades of miserable. She takes them off and rolls the cuffs of her dirty, stretched out jeans up more out of habit than any concern the water could do any additional harm to them.

The water is cool between her toes. Tossing her head back, she lets the secret bubble up fully from her navel, the weighty shame of it a hot flush at her cheeks, the back of her neck. It felt trivial, years ago, and meaningless as the years went on. And Ron and Harry and everyone else had secrets - secrets which have landed her here this very second. So why can she not have something just to herself?

She looks back over her shoulder to double check Harry hasn’t followed her before sitting, wrapping her arms around her knees and watching the little pinpricks emerge from the inky night above to reflect on the sea below.

 

Anxiety, icy and unforgivingly unshakeable, clenches a vise around her chest tighter with each step into the library. She hasn’t cried anymore, at least, since first stepping into the cavernous room after her first fitful four hours of sleep in her new dormitory. (The girls were nice _enough_ , the prefect who lead them to the Fat Lady had also been nice _enough_ , though by and large Hermione was mostly stuck with how _loud_ everything was. Even Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil’s late night, tearful whispers seemed magnified to her as if by a megaphone as she had feigned sleep). Books were stacked well into the high, vaulting arches of the ceilings - maybe purposefully unreachable - and the soft smell of old paper and ink and the dark wood of the shelves and desks wash over her as a physical weight. For a single brief moment Hermione thinks there may be books in the floorboards, for how they are crammed in on the walls and shelves surely they must expand to every other inch of the room as well. There was no way any one human could get though all these books in a lifetime, even if she started now and did nothing else.

So Hermione had found a corner, silent in the violet pre-dawn, and sobbed onto her folding arms, awash in an impossible desire and an overwhelming understanding of failure from the start.

Now, several weeks out, the stopper on those things is tighter, a ripple at her spine instead of a vast ocean of tar. The grandfather clock towering in the corner furthest from the door is enchanted to sound in all corners of the library, though she nestles as far away as she can get regardless. Tonight, as she spreads out her parchment and quill - (though after Christmas she thinks she may have to bring some regular pens and notebooks back, this hassle was so unnecessary) - and the stacks she’s to get through before turning in, she feels a familiar breeze at her neck from the restricted section behind her.

A half formed plan, a permission slip burning a hole in her school bag underneath the rolls she’s wrapped in napkins from the Great Hall in lieu of an actual dinner. McGonagall may be the most likely to sign it, but she’s also the least likely to believe any excuse or lie covering up that she just wants to _know_.

Hermione taps the nub of her quill on the unevenly hewn wood of the desk before grabbing the book at the top of the stack - _Hellenistic Beliefs and Magickal Lore: From Olympus to the Rise of Rome_ for Mr. Binn’s essay due in two weeks. Dragging the dog eared copy of _A History of Magic_ out of her bag in case she needs to cross reference anything, she picks the rolls out as an afterthought. One bun in hand, she flips open the chapter they were discussing in class that afternoon and settles into the first warm caresses of magic she remembers feeling.

And it has to be a special kind of magic, what happens when she reads, though she hasn’t been brave enough to ask anyone about it yet. It’s more than imagination - tonight she reads of Delphi and feels the sun warm on her face and shoulders, the Mediterranean sharp and salty at the back of her tongue. An herb that's cloyingly sweet, unfamiliar to her immediate recognition clings to the soft knit of her vest, heady over the smell of the leather bound tomes in the library. It's a reality overtop of her own, existing impossibly at the same time and place.

She digs the pad of her index finger on the sharpest part of the quill nib, lets the prick bring her back. She’s gotten lost before, when not careful. Sighing, she begins her notes.

_Pythia serves a unique role in Hellenistic and Pre-Hellenic lore alike, given how openly she practiced her craft among muggles. Her gifts became fundamental in histories of the Delphi region and of Hellenistic polytheism in post Mycenaean Greece as a whole._

 

“Hermione.”

Harry has to duck to avoid a sparking wand to the eye as Hermione jumps immediately to her feet, only half awake, caught still in her dreamlike memory.

“It’s me, Hermione, you were - ”

“I know, Harry.” She snaps, scrubbing a hand over her face. His wand is alight at his side, the sand shimmering beneath his feet. “Just. Take watch. I’ll set up the tent.” 

He frowns at her, clearly biting some stinging reply. The pity in his clear restraint only makes her angrier. “I already _did_. Go sleep.”

She chews her cheek before turning on her heel and retreating wordlessly.

Harry has cast a little warming charm on the tent, protecting it from much of the chill outside, and lit one of the lanterns at the tent’s entrance, which flickers cheerily as she passes. Trying to mollify her from earlier. Her lip curls reflexively.

Tossing her shoes near the foot of her bunk, she yanks her jeans off and collapses into the little unmade nest of blankets. No matter how she burrows into the fleece and knit coverlets sleeps stubbornly refuses her. She isn’t desperate enough to exhaust the little vial of sleeping draught she has squirrelled away in her bag, though each minute she spends with her eyes scrunched shut and miserably, unfortunately awake sours her mood impossibly further. After long minutes of fidgeting, the best she gets is a continuation of that dreamy secret memory. The images are hyper-defined, richer and sharper than they occurred in real life, and they turn sharply in her gut. She submits to them anyway, playing out on the roof of the tent above her.

 

The night bell has long since tolled announcing close, a friendly sixth-year Hufflepuff tapping her shoulder to remind her Madame Pince will be making her final rounds soon. Hermione half hears them over the sound of wind in a fig tree, heavy with swollen, ripe fruit. Sunlight filters through leaves the size of a spread palm, dappling the soft grass below in buttery afternoon light.

She resolutely does not want to leave.

Waving him off, Hermione turns back to her text. She doesn't emerge until her watch reads two a.m. and it’s full dark, the lanterns overhead cold from being dead for so long. She looks around herself dumbly for a moment, the creak of her chair a roar in the silence in the room.

Well, balls.

Whatever spell that’s settled into the space between the books on the shelves around her seems fragile; thin, brittle frost over a speeding rapid. A cat balanced before a pounce. Collecting her things, she moves as softly as a hunted animal, slow and quiet to avoid the eyes that track in the darkness.

It’s ridiculous, there are no eyes. She’s alone and she’s - going to get sent back home if she is caught out of bed after hours. She has to get back to the dormitory quickly and without being seen. Plodding as delicately as she’s able to, clutching her bag to her side to limit the jingling from within, she can’t believe Madame Pince overlooked her making her final sweep of the room.

(It’s not until she looks up from poring over Hidden Moons: A Lycanthropic Genealogy in the early spring of her third year to another empty hall that she is forced to acknowledge this is a - a thing. Maybe she should get around to asking someone about it. But then her teacher was a werewolf and the rat was a murderer and the time travel business all sort of prevented a heart to heart about getting perhaps literally lost in books).

But this first time, she pokes her head to the marginally better lit hall before all but tip-toeing out; not even daring to light her wand. It’s all going remarkably well, till the first scuttle in the dark to her left has her ducking into the first classroom she can throw herself into. She breathlessly locks the door behind her, heart a frantic pounding that threatens to beat out of her chest altogether.

And that’s before she gets her eyes on the mirror.

The classroom has clearly not been in use for some time, serving instead as a storage area for old chairs stacked high in a corner, dog-eared textbooks on a bookshelf to her left well past its prime.

It’s strange to see - something that could be in her school back home. It’s wasteful now, where it would be familiar there. A wave of a wand can fix the broken legs and wobbly tabletops, she knows. But somehow these were not even worth that effort, though she can't imagine why.

Movement at the corner of her eye makes cold certainty settle heavy as a rock in her gut. She’s been caught.

No - just her reflection in the mirror. She exhales heavily before doing a double take.

_What’s this?_

 

“Harry, honestly. I can’t sleep - just. Go to bed. I’ll take watch.”

He opens his mouth to argue, but she waves him off, shimmying her jeans back on. “Please don’t argue with me anymore. You’ve been up just as long as I have. Rest before we have to leave tomorrow.”

Harry’s pulling his jumper off even as he shakes his head. “Promise you’ll take some of the sleeping draught tomorrow, at least.”

“Yes, fine,” she lies, watching him sprawl gracelessly onto his cot.

“I’m sorry, Hermione.”

He means it, she knows. But aside from a little dip of her chin Hermione can’t acknowledge that any further. It’s not his fault anyway - apologies are a waste of energy between them.

She digs _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_ out of her bag out of habit before plopping down at the tent’s entrance.

It was harder with fiction, which she never had much patience for in the first place, but at this point what was the harm in trying?

 

Hermione knows better than to mess around with enchanted objects, really. She tells herself that, anyway, peering into the reflection flickering oddly on the floor-length mirror’s scratched, smudged surface.

A Hermione some ten years older than she is, with a smoother, easier smile and with more evenly sized teeth than she’s ever destined to naturally have blinks back at her. Mirror Hermione has cheekbones that bloom high and sharp and belong to no one in her family, with a soft bust and a stomach that was narrow and flat enough to belong on the front pages of the _Razzles_ her cousin Will kept stashed in a poorly-hidden bedside drawer.

Most importantly, Mirror Hermione is dressed as the Minister of Magic, which catches thickly in her throat. Over a smart looking muggle pantsuit - (a delicate shade of pink Hermione would never dare to wear in reality) - a rich purple robe hangs open off of her shoulders like a cape, embroidered with shimmering green and gold, patterns that shift like crawling ants. Atop her impossibly tamed ringlets sits the hat she’s seen Fudge wear in the Prophet, and held in the crook of one bent elbow is a thick volume bound in supple, rich brown leather and embossed in gold at the spine with her name. She looks back up at the strange reflection and yelps when it abruptly shifts - a birdseye view of Westminster, where still older and still perfect Hermione stands in ceremonial dress sans wig watching the House of Commons fill up with MPs in front of her. A greying man to her left addresses her as Madame Speaker before the image shifts again.

Mirror Hermione stands over a steaming cauldron in the potions dungeon, hair resolutely not frizzing despite the humidity evident in the room. At the door behind her, a small voice and a gleaming head of blonde hair appear.

“Professor Granger?”

Gasping, Hermione stumbles backwards as the image shifts again, landing hard on her rear. Her heart pounds heavily high in her throat, and she looks around as if for affirmation that was, in fact, real. She runs a hand through the damp, frizzing coils at her head. Of course it wasn’t real.

Allowing herself a moment after the strange turn her evening has taken, she leans back to lay spread eagle on the cool floor underneath her. She’s read of potions that pull truth like teeth from the mouth, once a passing mention of an old magic that can crack a skull open like an egg to poke at the yolky hidden parts.

But this. Nothing like this, the physical reflection of late-night musings, half-formed pipe dreams that live only in the place before wakefulness. Secret fancies too outlandish to tell her mother about, to acknowledge even to herself as actual wants.  
But each blink is a new flash of those reflections behind her lids, which have now taken root in her mind like a weed. How has she ever pretended to not want?

Chewing at her lip, she brings her arm above her head to look at her watch. 4:02. The Great Hall opens in less than an hour, and it’s not worth the hassle of sneaking back to her dorm for an hour of sleep she knew wouldn’t find her.

She sits up slowly before crawling towards the mirror and sitting back on her heels. Hardly sparing the door a glance her eyes find the mirror again, which picks up precisely where it left off.

 

Ron and Harry would tell her, much later, of a Mirror of Erised sprawled on the floor of Molly’s house, peeking up through the spaces in their Christmas tree while Molly and Arthur snored drunkenly upstairs, Ginny and the twins taking leisurely laps on their brooms outside. Some instinct in her gut had her feigning surprise - after that first night she had gone to the library and searched near endlessly for the words she’d seen etched at the upmost curve of it, once she had convinced herself to leave. And what she found convinced her to not go back.

_That’s all you saw? Nothing else?_

She had bitten the words and the inside of her cheek alike to keep them down.

The boys thought too small, content with too little.

No, that’s not right - she pushes a low hanging branch out of her face. She wants too much, and too fiercely, and purely for herself. She shames herself privately for thinking otherwise, though at night she imagines new patterns on her Minister’s robe.

 

“Morning.”

“Remind me to cut your hair soon. Also I need you to listen to me.”

“’Course!” Harry says with with too much eagerness than the situation calls for, coming sit across from her. Patchy stubble dots his chin and jaw, which he scratches at absently, sticking one foot out to nudge at her knee. She jerks back reflexively, glaring.

“I think I have an idea about this,” she waves the book in her lap helpfully.

“Oh,” He says, bizarrely deflating for some reason. She huffs, running a hand across her brow.

“I suppose I have something I need to show you, first.” Pausing, Hermione tilts her face up to the golden dawn. “Reach in my bag - can you grab _Hogwarts: A History_ for me?”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written for this fandom in literally 14 years, so I appreciate you bearing with me as I'm sure I'm a bit rusty ;)
> 
> If you enjoyed this, you can also find me on [the tumbles](http://violetteacup.tumblr.com) or drop a note below. Thank you for reading!


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